This year the World Press Photo exhibition in Russia had no sponsors, in order to raise operating costs the organizers have launched a crowdfunding campaign.

The Russian Centre of Documentary Photography PHOTODOC began a fundraising campaign to cover the costs of organizing the World Press Photo 2015 exhibition in Moscow. The exhibition will become part of the 31 Days Fotofest festival, held in Centre of Design “ArtPlay” on May 15th.

For the first time in the seven year history of the organization the WPP exhibition was not supported by sponsors, so the organizers launched a crowdfunding campaign on the planeta.ru to cover the costs.

“It’s possible that some of the sponsors refused because of political reasons (This year first place was given to Dutch photographer Mads Nissen and his photo of a gay couple sharing an intimate moment in St Petersburg. — BiF.), however in the majority of cases everything is more trivial – expenditures on the social and PR- projects were removed from the big companies’ budgets that were prepared at the end of 2014 – beginning 2015,” said Alexander Sorin, curator of “Photodoc.”

“We launched it on our own risk with a hope that we’ll break even, however we do understand that it’s possible that our revenues will be in the minus column. We can’t violate the agreement with World Press Photo (Alezander Sorin and his partner Leonid Gusev are required to run exhibition in Russia. — BiF), but if we are able to explain that we have force majeure and they are able to understand us, there will be no place for us in this business in the future because nobody will deal with us anymore, and that will be fair,” added Sorin.

50,000 out of 300,000 rubes were collected during first 4 days. The campaign still has 54 days to go.